It is hard to keep a white dress clean. The church is full of heads that are blue-white, full of light that is stained red from white, full of white candles and white patent leather shoes and white gloves on white clean hands covering fingernails that are white and not dirty
It is hard to keep a white dress clean but if you sit with your spine straight enough it becomes a lightning rod for God and he can speak through you and keep your twitchy self from bumping around in the pew. He’ll take your hands and bless you if you’re good enough, close your eyes at the right times, turn the other cheek, don’t eat food on the fast days, don’t kiss girls on the best days.
It is hard to keep a white dress clean. It is hard to keep a white dress clean. On the bad nights, it’s cold water and hydrogen peroxide. Blood from the bites. Skin all afire. Knees shaking pink, scabbed, all coated with the flexibility of human sin.
It is hard to keep a white dress clean.
She is indigo, her hands cardamom, her lipstick a rusty chain on your collarbones, both of you dancing tangoes in the too-fast morning, your breath a magnolia in the air for once, a bloom over the two of you in air that is white for dancing with sun
If you bleach the stain it will come out on the second wash. If you watch enough movies with princes in them, the stain that’s spreading across your tongue from loving her will get covered up. Gotta soak the cloth. Get it damp and scrub with your favorite tide wash. Shove it between your socks and bras and hope your father doesn’t figure out, wash it after they go to sleep in the black night. Check it by the light of a flashlight, are you in the clear or did the smell of her come seeping through the stitches. Wash it a third time with the rest of the whites so nobody knows what happened.
On sunday get back to white bible pages, words dripping over your skin and leaving little ant prints. White smile while you shake hands with a stranger. Sit so still that your mother pats your hands and grins at you, white teeth that gnaw their way out of you. White wafer under your tongue that dissolves into you to break down all your black burning bits.
And your dress is clean. And your dress is clean. Isn’t it.
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